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Blazing Star by Alexander Larman

Matthew Dennison

June 28 2014, 1:06am, The Times

The reputation of 17th-century courtier poet Lord Rochester as archetypal literary libertine is of his own fashioning. Famously he wrote, “I’ve swived more whores more ways than Sodom’s walls/E’er knew” and, by way of variation, “missing my whore I bugger my page”. His agonising death at the age of 33 from a ruptured stomach ulcer that caused “vast quantities of purulent matter in his urine”, itself a result of syphilis, consolidated his posthumous fate. His was a life of tabloid excess.

“He lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,” opined Dr Johnson. Alexander Larman’s biography rejects assertions of worthlessness and uselessness. “At his best,” Larman writes, “Rochester was responsible for some of the wittiest, most bitingly satirical…

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